Comments on: Computing Machinery and Creativity http://davidsiegel.org/computing-machinery-and-creativity/ David Siegel Wed, 08 Sep 2010 16:29:35 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Ada Lovelace and the Turing Test < The Plenitude of Arboreal Beauty http://davidsiegel.org/computing-machinery-and-creativity/comment-page-1/#comment-2166 Ada Lovelace and the Turing Test < The Plenitude of Arboreal Beauty Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:28:58 +0000 http://blog.davebsd.com/2008/03/03/computing-machinery-and-creativity/#comment-2166 [...] In Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing describes the famous Turing Test for detecting machine intelligence. Did you know that Turing’s thesis was heavily influenced by Ada Lovelace’s critique of Babbage’s Analytical Engine, wherein she states that “the Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything,” arguing that computing machines do not exhibit creativity? You can read more about Lovelace’s critique of the possibility of machine creativity, and how this critique informed Turing’s work on machine intelligence in my paper, Computing Machinery and Creativity. [...] [...] In Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing describes the famous Turing Test for detecting machine intelligence. Did you know that Turing’s thesis was heavily influenced by Ada Lovelace’s critique of Babbage’s Analytical Engine, wherein she states that “the Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything,” arguing that computing machines do not exhibit creativity? You can read more about Lovelace’s critique of the possibility of machine creativity, and how this critique informed Turing’s work on machine intelligence in my paper, Computing Machinery and Creativity. [...]

]]> By: David http://davidsiegel.org/computing-machinery-and-creativity/comment-page-1/#comment-766 David Sun, 09 Mar 2008 10:16:21 +0000 http://blog.davebsd.com/2008/03/03/computing-machinery-and-creativity/#comment-766 Right, I agree that human brains work in an analogous manner to computers, and that it is possible to describe human behavior in terms of a person's (massively huge, complex) input. Maybe it's just that we are still unable to completely describe this behavior in terms of its input, which is why there is still room for human creativity. I think that a genius sees very little creativity in the behavior of other humans, and an omniscient being would see no creativity; your average person sees some creativity in the behavior of computers, but a computer scientist or engineer sees less creativity on the part of the computer. Right, I agree that human brains work in an analogous manner to computers, and that it is possible to describe human behavior in terms of a person’s (massively huge, complex) input. Maybe it’s just that we are still unable to completely describe this behavior in terms of its input, which is why there is still room for human creativity. I think that a genius sees very little creativity in the behavior of other humans, and an omniscient being would see no creativity; your average person sees some creativity in the behavior of computers, but a computer scientist or engineer sees less creativity on the part of the computer.

]]> By: Jacob Andreas http://davidsiegel.org/computing-machinery-and-creativity/comment-page-1/#comment-767 Jacob Andreas Sun, 09 Mar 2008 03:53:34 +0000 http://blog.davebsd.com/2008/03/03/computing-machinery-and-creativity/#comment-767 "the crude mechanisms of the transformed Hydra would make its operation completely transparent to us, and the previously inexplicable interactions among heuristics would reveal themselves as trivial tabulations that we could roughly follow with our minds" If we are going to consider Hydra in this way then we must do the same to the human mind - after all, any process of human thought - including creativity - can observed at the level of neurons, and the behavior of individual neurons is no less trivial an operation than the one performed by Hydra's transistors. "the total behavior of a discrete state machine is strictly a function of its input [...] In order for the computer to be creative in Lovelace’s sense of the term, it would have to produce some output that is not wholly determined by its input. "I still hesitate to equate the apparent creativity of a computer with that of a human, though, due to computer creativity’s reducibility to computation." But by this new definition of creativity, human minds cannot be said to be creative either. After all, when we are discussing the input we must consider not only the parameters of the present chess game but everything that has ever happened to the chess player from the moment of his birth. If there is any element of this response that is not derived from experience, it is random (which we consider to be part of the input), and it follows that the behavior of the human mind is similarly determined wholly by input. While I agree that chess is no substitute for the Turing test, I disagree that a program's creativity signifies nothing about its intelligence. Creativity is a (significant) subset of intelligence, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to consider a program that plays chess creatively to be "intelligent" in some limited, but no less real, way. Douglas Hofstadter addresses issue more eloquently in GEB, but I can't seem to find where. “the crude mechanisms of the transformed Hydra would make its operation completely transparent to us, and the previously inexplicable interactions among heuristics would reveal themselves as trivial tabulations that we could roughly follow with our minds”

If we are going to consider Hydra in this way then we must do the same to the human mind – after all, any process of human thought – including creativity – can observed at the level of neurons, and the behavior of individual neurons is no less trivial an operation than the one performed by Hydra’s transistors.

“the total behavior of a discrete state machine is strictly a function of its input [...] In order for the computer to be creative in Lovelace’s sense of the term, it would have to produce some output that is not wholly determined by its input.
“I still hesitate to equate the apparent creativity of a computer with that of a human, though, due to computer creativity’s reducibility to computation.”

But by this new definition of creativity, human minds cannot be said to be creative either. After all, when we are discussing the input we must consider not only the parameters of the present chess game but everything that has ever happened to the chess player from the moment of his birth. If there is any element of this response that is not derived from experience, it is random (which we consider to be part of the input), and it follows that the behavior of the human mind is similarly determined wholly by input.

While I agree that chess is no substitute for the Turing test, I disagree that a program’s creativity signifies nothing about its intelligence. Creativity is a (significant) subset of intelligence, and it doesn’t seem unreasonable to consider a program that plays chess creatively to be “intelligent” in some limited, but no less real, way.

Douglas Hofstadter addresses issue more eloquently in GEB, but I can’t seem to find where.

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